In a post on CrimeReads, Mary Robinette Kowal shares how The Thin Man movie series inspired her latest novel. And by inspired, she means stole all the things she loved about the movies and used them in her writing.
We are big fans of this approach. Rather than write fan-fiction, we’d love all writers to indulge their love of certain characters and situations by stealing the elements they love – the tropes, moods, character archetypes, contrasts, and settings – and creating their own thing. Your time-traveling dork doesn’t need to be a doctor and your space explorers needn’t be enterprising. There’s room for so many more, with your own unique twist.
As Kowal explains.
“When I decided I wanted to do ‘The Thin Man in space,’ I needed to understand the structure of the Nick and Nora movies specifically,” she says. After watching all six films, she identified common elements: the married couple, the reluctant detective, the encouraging wife, multiple murders, and others. With that, she began worldbuilding to establish her setting, a luxury cruise ship in the future.
To differentiate her protagonist couple from Nick and Nora Charles, she turned to the tool of inversion. “I really enjoy taking a piece of a story and turning it into its opposite,” Kowal says. “In the films, Nick is the detective and Nora is the spouse who wants to participate in sleuthing but isn’t allowed.” Rather than gender swap the characters, Kowal swapped their roles, allowing the non-sleuthing wife to investigate while the detective husband is detained as a suspect.
Like Nora Charles, Tesla Crane is a wealthy heiress, but Kowal switches up the why and how of her circumstances. By making Crane a famous inventor, Kowal steals an element from Nick Charles – his fame as a detective – and grants it to his stand-in wife.
“My goal is to wind up with something that has the glittering banter and twists of The Thin Man movies with the gee-whiz factor of an interplanetary cruise liner,” Kowal says. “Nick and Nora in space. The same, but different.”
